annoyedIt is currently at the head of my short list for "worst book I read in 2012." I want those hours of my life back.
It wasn't offensive; it didn't call me names or slap my hands or steal my shit. It wasn't poorly written, although it had some pacing issues; the words were in the right order and generally spelled correctly. I can't in all good conscience call it a bad book. But I hated it. Absolutely, empirically, and with very few caveats. It was not my cup of tea. It wasn't even in my cup of tea's time zone. So why did I pick it up?
The blurbs. They made me think this book and I would get along, thus projecting one of the Geek Fallacies onto an innocent piece of prose. Friendship is not transitive, and neither is readability.
This is the dark side of blurbs: this is why authors sometimes have to say "no," even if they like another author's work. Because when I put my name on the cover of a book, I am saying "I like this, and if you like the things I like, you will like it, too." But what happens when you don't? Suddenly everything else I like is questionable. What if Diet Dr Pepper, Monster High dolls, and carnage are all waiting to betray you, too? Where is the line?
We have to be careful. We are trading on your faith, and our reputations.
Have you ever read a book based on the blurbs, only to find your faith in the authors who provided them somewhat shaken? Not your faith in the author who wrote the book—presumably, if you bought it based on blurbs, you didn't have any—but your faith in the blurbers?
(*No, I will not name the book. Why? Well, one, I am not in the business of bad book reviews, unless it's a non-fiction book riddled with factual errors. Other people obviously enjoyed this book, otherwise the blurbs wouldn't have been there in the first place. Your mileage may vary, and all. And two, as an author, I wouldn't want to find someone ranting about one of my books like this. So since the book didn't murder my puppies, I will not name it.)
February 19 2012, 03:02:31 UTC 5 years ago
I have had this experience with booksellers whose opinions I otherwise trust. I had a book, an epic fantasy which was a Big Excited Thing and has since been largely forgotten (the final book in the trilogy didn't even get published, and not because the author didn't actually write it) which was hyped up to me as being Utterly Fantastic and Full Of All The Stuff I Loved In The Books I Have Been Buying from this bookseller.
Normally, this is what I love about independent booksellers. They get to know you. They get to know your taste. They will hold things aside for you, they will recommend things. It's fantastic.
I hated this book.
HATED. IT. And hated it in ways that made me sit and scratch my head and wonder what the hades the educated woman who otherwise knew my tastes, was a genre reader and thus not snobbish about it (and giving me the "here, this is crap! you like crap!" recommendation) was drinking when she read it.
It was trite.
It was poorly written.
It was sterotyped.
It was a badly written Mary Sue.
The main characters were both insufferable. I wanted to drown the triangulated Sort of Evil But Not Really love interest. I ended up rooting for the villain. This was sad, because he was stupid.
I'm really, really intolerant of dumb villains. They don't give me any kind of threat; if your hero is a shining bastion of uber-powered goodness and probably marshmallow filling, and a super genius, and whatever, and your villain is a bumbling, cackling caricature of evil that seems like he escaped from a Three Stoges film, then your book may get thrown across the room with great force. So you can imagine how much I hated the other characters if I was rooting for Larry the EEEEVIL and his henchmen.
To this day I am not sure why I finished that book. I don't know. I paid money for it; I didn't have a lot of money. And it was kind of like a train wreck. It was horrid and I couldn't turn my head away.
I ended up giving it to a friend. "I think you would REALLY, REALLY like this." I assured her. It was a "Here, you like crap! This is crap!" recommendation.
She LOVED it and so far as I know is still angry that the planned trilogy was never finished.
...
Sometimes I think I am a bad friend.
February 19 2012, 18:01:20 UTC 5 years ago
Well, there's "You like crap, this is crap," and there's "I hate bananas, you like bananas, this has bananas." If somebody hands me a crap smoothie, I'm not going to recommend it to anybody. If I get a banana-strawberry-pineapple smoothie, I'll give it to my mom.
February 19 2012, 22:03:47 UTC 5 years ago
*Actually I now think this sounds fantastic. I would probably read this!
September 27 2012, 18:00:09 UTC 4 years ago
Sometimes I am in the mood for a burger made with meat that is already mostly chewed, and "cheese food". It is not high quality, but it had better not be tainted or contain foreign objects.
And thus certain kinds of crap reading material.